


The Price of Love

by Ironlawyer



Category: Marvel 616, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Grief/Mourning, M/M, New Avengers, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-23 23:24:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13200798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ironlawyer/pseuds/Ironlawyer
Summary: Tony lingers, burned into Steve’s life and heart.  How do you learn to live alone again?





	The Price of Love

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cap Iron Man Community](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Cap+Iron+Man+Community).



> Inspired by the Cap-IM Holiday Exchange community prompt:
> 
> "Think of two people, living together day after day, year after year, in this small space, standing elbow to elbow cooking at the same small stove, squeezing past each other on the narrow stairs, shaving in front of the same small bathroom mirror, constantly jogging, jostling, bumping against each other’s bodies by mistake or on purpose, sensually, aggressively, awkwardly, impatiently, in rage or in love – think what deep though invisible tracks they must leave, everywhere, behind them!" ― Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
> 
> \--
> 
> Thanks to my beta.

Tony’s toothbrush has been sitting on the bathroom sink untouched for three weeks. The bristles are bent from chewing and old toothpaste crusts the handle. Steve’s hand hovers over it with the reflex to put it away. He leaves the bathroom with the brush untouched and without taking a shower. 

He takes Tony’s aftershave from the drawer and it’s running on empty. Steve was going to buy more for Tony’s birthday but that would be something dangerous now. He needs to let go. He snaps the cap off and sniffs the dregs and tries to convince himself that this is all Tony smelled off. He is not ready to lose it. That faint undercurrent of motor oil that doesn’t go away even after a shower, that expensive shampoo and the hint of Steve’s own aftershave so thoroughly mingled with Tony’s that they could be one. They _were_ one.

He puts the bottle back in the drawer.

He should run. It’s been weeks since he last worked out and there was a time when running felt good. He pictures himself running the rout he’s run a thousand times and wonders how he did it, how it ever helped, how it ever felt good. Maybe it only felt good because he could come home to Tony. Tony’s hands rubbing his back in the shower, massaging the knots out of his thighs, running down his ass. Tony’s breath in his ear. Tony’s lips against his. 

He should get dressed, but Tony’s jackets still hang in the closet. He buries his face in them sometimes and tries to tell himself he can smell him, but really there’s only must and fabric and the feint smell of their shared detergent. Tony is fading from his life, leaving behind tracks so worn into his soul that he can’t remember what it feels like to be whole.

He puts on a bathrobe and heads to the empty kitchen. He used to be up earlier than everyone, now he’s up later. Sometimes he makes breakfast for two, cracks the eggs in the pan before he realises and sobs as they burn. 

Tony’s mug is still in the cupboard.

He drinks a cup of lukewarm coffee someone brewed hours ago and stares at the other coffee machine, the one no one uses now because it’s too complicated. He doesn’t breathe as he drinks because he doesn’t want the smell of coffee caught in his nostrils and its phantom following him for the rest of the day.

People don’t disappear when they die. They leave behind things half-finished and for later. A sketchbook open on the kitchen counter, that sugary cereal only he ever ate, DVR set to record every episode of CSI. There is no sense of loss because it’s no different than a business trip. Their home says he’s coming back. Steve can’t shake it. He goes morning to morning with a brick in his stomach because Tony should be coming back and Tony is never coming back and every time he remembers that, it’s like seeing him die again.

There is too much Tony here. There is not enough of him. He would give up everything just to hold him one more time, to bury his face in Tony’s neck and run his hands down his back. To say _I love you_ one last time and make sure that Tony knew, really knew, what those words mean. There is nothing he wouldn’t do. It scares him sometimes, when he lies awake staring at the ceiling and Mephisto’s name dances across his mind and he knows that he would do it in a second if he believed it would really bring him back.

Logan is sprawled across the couch in the living room, an unlit cigar dangling from his lips, he grunts as Steve sits across from him. ‘You can smoke, if you want,’ Steve says, because Tony chose this couch and Tony hung those pictures and Tony insisted on a TV twenty inches bigger than anyone could need. And Tony hated the smell of Logan’s cigars.

Logan watches him for a moment, but Steve doesn’t look back. He lights the cigar without a word and the room fills with woody smoke that smells nothing like Tony. It seeps into the furniture and wallpaper and Steve’s clothes and says, _Tony’s never coming home._

His eyes are burning. His lungs are tight. He never liked cigar smoke any more than Tony did. He gets up to leave and Logan doesn’t react until he’s at the door. ‘Cap?’ He blows smoke from his nostrils and stubs the cigar out on a crystal coaster that might’ve been precious or might’ve been junk, and now he’ll never know. ‘Sorry about your boyfriend,’ Logan says. It’s a perfunctory condolence, meaningless. He wants to tell him to shut up. Carol and Rhodey and Jan can say they’re sorry because they loved him, maybe not like Steve did, but they have just as much right to grieve. Logan hardly knew him.

He walks out.

In their room he sits on the edge of the bed. Tony’s side, closest to the door so he won’t disturb Steve on the nights he’s too busy to come to bed at a decent hour. Tony’s book is still on the nightstand, a business card marker poking out the top, waiting for the day he comes to finish it. Steve covers his eyes, his shoulders are shaking and his breath is cracking. _He_ is cracking. Tony is everywhere and everything and buried so deep in his life and soul that he will never be free. He doesn’t want to be free. He wants to look at Tony’s books and smell Tony’s coffee, feel his warmth in their bed, talk to him, touch him, kiss him. He has never needed anything so bad before. He sobs and sobs until he’s burnt out.

When he opens his eyes again, Tony’s book is still there. He grabs it and starts to leaf though. It’s all diagrams and technical words he can’t understand. Tony’s life. The part of him Steve will never get to understand. He went to Tony’s workshop once, _after_ , stood amongst cables and computers and unfinished projects. He’d stood eye-to-eye with one of the suits and could almost imagine that Tony was inside, that he would lift the faceplate and kiss him. That the suit would wrap an arm around him and they could shoot off through the sky to some place better and safer where Tony would never leave him. It almost felt like being together again. But the suit's eyes were empty and it stayed too still to hold the illusion. Tony was movement and energy, there was a buzz of vibrancy that radiated from the metal shell and made you know that someone was alive in there.

Despite that, Steve had clung to it, sobbing into its shoulder, speaking to it as if Tony could hear him. _I love you, I miss you, I’m sorry, please don’t leave me, please come back. Please. Please. Please._ But the suit is just a thing and there was no comfort to be found there.

He hasn’t gone back since.

Maybe it would be better if he got rid of Tony’s things. He can’t live with all of the reminders. He doesn’t want to remember that he will never again know the way Tony looks in Westwood, or an oil stained tank top. The way Tony trimmed his beard every morning or fell asleep with a scientific journal in his lap every night. All the things that made up Tony are just things now. He should be able to let go, call a charity to collect the $10,000 paintings and designer suits and throw the rest away. But as much as they are only things, they are Tony’s things and they should never be anyone else’s. A person can’t be bleached away and you can’t cure cancer by pretending it doesn’t exist. He places the book back on the nightstand.

There’s a knock on the door. ‘Steve?’ Carol, tentative, concerned. She's been staying in the tower since the funeral. She could probably hear him crying. Some nights he finds her crying too, sitting alone in the kitchen in the early hours when sleep is too painful for both of them. He would’ve comforted her in the past but he has no room for other people’s pain now. Less still for their comforts.

‘I want to be alone,’ he says. Carol is silent for a long moment and as the seconds stretch his patience frays. She needs to leave. He is not ready to share this pain. Maybe he never will be. ‘Please,’ he tells her, ‘just go.’

‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Just… call if you need me.’ He waits for her footsteps to fade before he buries his head in his hands and lets his breathing shake into something broken. He staggers across the room and opens the bottom drawer, empty but for one shirt. Expensive, designer, long crusted with blood and sweat and the fear of a man who knows he is dying. He can’t let go. He will never let go. He brings the shirt to his face and closes his eyes. Breathes the fading smell of _Tony_ and wishes he was stronger than this. Tony would want him to feel better. But he is human and he is tired. He crawls under the covers, holds Tony’s shirt tight to his chest and sobs into his pillow until he falls asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> On [Tumblr](http://ironlawyer.tumblr.com/post/169437565052/he-community-gift-fics)


End file.
